“I wouldn’t worry, Betty,” I soothed her.  “He is big enough to take care of himself.  And with the best intentions in the world, you can’t have him all the time, you know.”

She was too much startled to be indignant.  She followed me into the library, where the sight of the pearls produced a tremendous excitement, and then every one had to go down to the store room, and see where the necklace had been hidden, and Max examined all the bars of soap for thumb prints.

Mr. Harbison did not appear.  Max commented on the fact caustically, but Dal hushed him up.  And so, Anne hugging her pearls, and Aunt Selina having put a final seasoning of washing powder on the clothes in the tub, we all went upstairs to bed.  It had been a long day, and the morning would at least bring bridge.

I was almost ready for bed when Jim tapped at my door.  I had been very cool to him since the night in the library when I was publicly staked and martyred, and he was almost cringing when I opened the door.

“What is it now?” I asked cruelly.  “Has Bella tired of it already, or has somebody else a rash?”

“Don’t be a shrew, Kit,” he said.  “I don’t want you to do anything.  I only—­when did you see Harbison last?”

“If you mean ‘last,’” I retorted, “I’m afraid I haven’t seen the last of him yet.”  Then I saw that he was really worried.  “Betty was leading him to the roof,” I added.  “Why?  Is he missing?”

“He isn’t anywhere in the house.  Dal and I have been over every inch of it.”  Max had come up, in a dressing gown, and was watching me insolently.

“I think we have seen the last of him,” he said.  “I’m sorry, Kit, to nip the little romance in the bud.  The fellow was crazy about you—­there’s no doubt of it.  But I’ve been watching him from the beginning, and I think I’m upheld.  Whether he went down the water spout, or across a board to the next house—­”

“I—­I dislike him intensely,” I said angrily, “but you would not dare to say that to his face.  He could strangle you with one hand.”

Max laughed disagreeably.

“Well, I only hope he is gone,” he threw at me over his shoulder, “I wouldn’t want to be responsible to your father if he had stayed.”  I was speechless with wrath.

They went away then, and I could hear them going over the house.  At one o’clock Jim went up to bed, the last, and Mr. Harbison had not been found.  I did not see how they could go to bed at all.  If he had escaped, then Max was right and the whole thing was heart-breaking.  And if he had not, then he might be lying—­

I got up and dressed.

The early part of the night had been cloudy, but when I got to the roof it was clear starlight.  The wind blew through the electric wires strung across and set them singing.  The occasional bleat of a belated automobile on the drive below came up to me raucously.  The tent gleamed, a starlit ghost of itself, and the boxwoods bent in the breeze.  I went over to the parapet and leaned my elbows on it.  I had done the same thing so often before; I had carried all my times of stress so infallibly to that particular place, that instinctively my feet turned there.